Bryan Cranston Talks His Murderous Impulses in Brain-Exposing Detail

GQ's August cover story on Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston isn't terribly revealing in the way you'd probably want it to be (i.e. virtually nothing is reported on the storyline of the upcoming final batch of Bad episodes). However, it does take a brutally honest turn when Cranston admits to relating to his morally threadbare character Walter White. Emphasis is on the brutal.

And it goes a little something like this:

Do you believe in evil?

"Yeah. I think it's right next to good, inside every person."

And have you encountered it yourself?

"I had one girlfriend I wanted to kill."

It was a woman he dated after his short-lived first marriage. She was a drug addict, terribly unstable, and she followed Cranston to New York when he left L.A. to work on the soap opera Loving. She stalked him, leaving messages on his answering machine: "I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna cut your balls off. I'm gonna have your dick sawed off." Finally, one day, the woman showed up at Cranston's Upper West Side apartment, banging on the door.

"And I envisioned myself killing her. It was so clear. My apartment had a brick wall on one side, and I envisioned opening the door, grabbing her by the hair, dragging her inside, and shoving her head into that brick wall until brain matter was dripping down the sides of it. Then I shuddered and realized how clearly I saw that happening. And I called the police because I was so afraid. I was temporarily insane—capable of doing tremendous damage to her and to myself."

Evil resides in every person right next to their good, but the former doesn't necessarily involve fantasies of skull-cracking and brain matter. Or maybe that's just me.